Last week, Steven Soderbergh offered his own cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a much more complete fashion than he did with either Raiders of the Lost Ark or Psycho. He didn’t merely provide a navel-gazing soundtrack to a black-and-whitified version of Indy so that everyone could focus in on how...

A renewed forehead slapping routine has hit the echo chamber of awards season watchdogs because Selma has, once again, come up short on the nomination front. This time it’s the short list for the Directors Guild, which looks 80% like photographs of the same man taken at different ages. It’s unfortunate, but...

Five years ago, Rob, Neil and I were dreading the time of year when moss grows on theater screens, and I suggested that January wasn’t all bad. That everyone had bought into the assumption that the month was a dumping ground even though there were good movies that came out...

In response to the vicious murder of 10 artists working for Charlie Hebdo and 2 police officers protecting the satirical magazine’s offices, CEO of the Center for Inquiry Ronald A. Lindsay said, “We are heartbroken by the unthinkable and cowardly attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris today, and outraged...

Even though exact data is difficult to pin down, it’s gut-level obvious that there were more movies released last year than in 1928, the year leading up to the first Academy Awards presentation at the Roosevelt Hotel. Worldwide releases that year might have come close to 500 (margin of error =...

In the depths of the 1980s AIDS crisis, a show premiered on Broadway that featured Cinderella quizzically singing about whether to marry a prince, a witch cursing the man who stole her beans and two bakers trying to find a white cow. By the end of “Into the Woods,” a...

This was a big week for the small-screen spandex set. Three separate comic book series (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, The Flash, Arrow) wrapped for a long winter hiatus, and each mid-season finale dropped a bombshell with mass quantities of comic book significance. As well they should. TV superheroes shouldn’t be relegated...

While we’re all covering Marvel vs DC like a novelty boxing match, and some are ogling Sony’s dirty laundry, Universal Pictures quietly did the most interesting thing possible this year. The studio that brought us Lucy and Neighbors is on track to make record profits without releasing a single traditional blockbuster. As...

If you’re at all into this Game of Thrones thing, you might’ve heard rumblings of a Game of Thrones video game released this week. That, in itself, is nothing surprising. Only the peak of game franchises are rewarded with their own movies (and even then, those movies are almost exclusively...

Nostalgia is a powerful thing (don’t believe me? Ask Don Draper). If no one felt any pangs of remembrance for cool old movies where people shot proton torpedoes into thermal exhaust ports or giant lizards ruined a theme park test tour, nobody would have given last week’s Star Wars: The...

There’s nothing scarier than being a parent. At first there’s the fear that the kid will be born okay, healthy. Then there’s the ongoing fear of physically harming them by accident, especially if you’re normally clumsy and especially especially if you let the idea of SIDS haunt your brain. And then...

Yesterday, Roxane Gay published a passionate, compelling and provocative piece on the recent rape accusations that have re-surfaced against Bill Cosby. In the piece, Gay recounts how meaningful The Cosby Show was to her as a child growing up in a black middle-class family, when she was unable to find...

I’m not sure what to do with the report that Sony is going to make an Aunt May spin-off movie without Spider-Man (other than have another cup of coffee and call it bullshit). Da7e at Latino Review has a solid enough batting average when it comes to wildly early scoops,...

Nightcrawler opened last week to strong admiration from critics (like this), but there was an unsettling note of uniformity in their praise. Most of the acclaim heaped on the film, as well as its lead performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, focused on a single point of reference: the 1970s. Critics favorably compared...

Getting swept up in a mass wave of superhero movie hype is extremely fun and everyone should do it. To that point, we at FSR have done just that — note the many “Is Marvel Doing This? Will Marvel Do That?” think pieces borne of last week’s Marvel Studios Phase...

You’ve probably already spotted the Esquire UK post called “Films Stupid People Think Are Clever” where the likes of Christopher Nolan and David Fincher are given the shortest end of the stick. It’s a worthless article that represents the easiest kind of contrarianism: People like these things? Let’s say we don’t...

“Every kid knows who Freddy is. He’s like Santa Claus or King Kong.” – Heather Langenkamp in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. In a film full of truthful observations, that line always struck me as the truest, or at least the most relevant to my own relationship with Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare...

Gone Girl is a cynical movie. No doubt. It features two sociopaths working out their deeply troubled marital issues in the public eye with just the right amount of bloodshed. Yet in more than a few ways, it could be an unofficial remake of The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey’s 1937 screwball...

Who would have thought the most brutal film of the year would be about jazz? Andrew (Miles Teller), the protagonist of Whiplash, is a first-year jazz drumming prodigy who possesses the talent to be one of the greats but not the work ethic. When he finally meets someone who can train...

Nobody loves Russian movies, even Russians themselves. Their films are very long, very slow, black & white or monochromatic. They are crowded by intellectual talk and lack plot, characters or any kind of entertainment. This is common knowledge and, of course, it’s not true. We, the Russians, love our cinema – although...